With the ability to reduce computing costs, access data-driven insights and create agile business software solutions, companies across nearly every industry are striving to digitally transform and integrate cloud computing into their tech stack.
Powerful, bespoke digital solutions that were once the reserve of companies with vast IT budgets or a department of technical experts are now within reach for everyone from enterprise through to SMBs and startups. That’s thanks to the huge increase in availability and choice on public cloud marketplaces.
Also known as hyperscaler marketplaces, they allow businesses to build cloud infrastructures and develop tailored solutions through a range of ‘off-the-shelf’ options. In short it helps customers reduce costs, scale faster and increase interoperability.
The Need to Publish on Hyperscaler Marketplaces
A third of B2B buyers already rely on B2B marketplaces to purchase half of all their products and it is predicted that global B2B marketplace sales will reach an estimated $3.6 trillion by 2024 [1]. Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) that don’t actively hunt out opportunities to join public marketplaces and ensure buyers have easy access to their products may see sales figures contract in the future.
Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform represent nearly 75% of the global public cloud market share [2]. If ISVs can publish on these hyperscaler marketplaces, they create an immediate way to increase product availability and tap into new cross-sell opportunities within subscription bundles. With global product reach and access to attractive annual recurring revenue streams, ISVs across the channel are in a race to join these marketplaces and begin making sales.
Yet while these marketplaces make it easier to tap into new customer segments, delivery isn’t so straightforward.
Using Operational Strategy to Propagate
Each cloud provider hosts and operates using a specific development framework. This means ISVs need to build unique APIs for every product and every marketplace they want to sell through to integrate their tech stack and publish software offers. Once published, additional development is required to manage ongoing product fulfillment and delivery. If the ISV wants to issue a software update, adjust the subscription model or quickly release a new solution to solve a market challenge then significant development time and operational budget are required to deliver these changes across every listing.
Not only that, but the fragmented delivery systems create additional layers of complexity in managing products across multiple marketplaces, different geographies, or within channel partner agreements. The problem compounds even further with the addition of an engineering workforce in short supply and high demand.
The operational complexity of hyperscaler marketplaces represents a significant roadblock; delaying time to market, decreasing agility and limiting cross-sell, partnership and ecosystem opportunities as a whole.
Why Automation is Key to Unlimited Expansion
In order to harness the full business potential on offer with hyperscaler marketplaces, ISVs need to rebuild their product delivery processes and incorporate new automated management solutions.
Developed to specifically address the challenges connected to selling on hyperscaler marketplaces, CloudBlue provides a low-code way to tap into the leading marketplaces and transform the sales potential of your products.
With a set of powerful pre-configured tools and market-ready integrations, CloudBlue lets you publish to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and AppSource, and Google Cloud Marketplaces and manage the sales and fulfillment lifecycle of every listing from a single platform.
Assisted onboarding aids product set-up but keeps ISVs in control of branding, order parameters and subscription deals. By centralizing operations, CloudBlue also helps to automate more stages of the process. For example, product changes need to be configured just once and the updates will apply to every marketplace you publish on.
Real-time validation parameters ensure that sales orders relate to fulfilment capabilities and automate complex billing and usage calculations for each individual customer or partner subscription. With operational control at your fingertips, you can expand and scale across the cloud supply chain without limit.
CloudBlue Platform: The Details
- Publish to AWS Marketplace, Microsoft Commercial Marketplaces, and Google Cloud Marketplace without additional integration. Cut development costs and accelerate time to market
- Configure product details to suit your requirements. Model sales by seat, by license or by usage rates and receive automatic billing information based on the configuration.
- Automate product fulfilment workflows using order parameters that validate in real-time. Easily manage complex sales, vendor agreements and partnership subscriptions
- Manage the entire fulfillment lifecycle and multi-subscription process. CloudBlue includes extensions that manage service status updates, including purchase, suspend, resume, and support recurring billing.
- Brand the customer experience. Use wizards to fully customize CloudBlue and ensure customers interact with your brand and product experience on every marketplace.
Find out more on how CloudBlue can help you publish on Hyperscaler Marketplaces.
- Study by financial services advisory firm iBe
- SaaS market share and revenue growth Synergy.com
